You Can Now Track Your Periods Using Your Fitbit

In a press release issued today by Fitbit, Inc via Business Wire, Fitbit announced it's unveiling of their new smartwatch Fitbit Versa™  - now available for preorder. They also announced new female health tracking to help women track their menstrual cycle, view holistic health data in one place, and better understand connections to their overall health. Female health tracking will be available on-device for Fitbit Versa and FitbitIonic™ users, and to Fitbit® app users starting in Spring 2018.

Here’s how Fitbit’s period-tracking feature is supposed to work when it rolls out this spring according to the Verge:

It’s free and will work not only on the Versa watch, but on the Fitbit Ionic watch and in the mobile app as well. If you indicate during the Fitbit onboarding process that you’re female, the app will ask if you want to opt in to tracking your menstrual cycle. Once you do that and begin telling the app when your period starts and ends, the app will show your predicted period week as pink, and your predicted fertile window as blue.

You won’t be able to manually annotate anything in the app, but it will ask you to tap on a series of icons describing premenstrual symptoms, the consistency of your bodily fluids, whether you have headaches or acne, your sexual activity, and more. If you happen to become pregnant or you take the morning-after pill — both period disruptors — the app will want to know that, too.

This is all supposed to help inform its users, who, Fitbit says, had been requesting period tracking as a “top five” feature for a while. And maybe in the not-so-far future, this could help people spot patterns around their periods and other health metrics (though Fitbit won’t account for things like heart rate data in the early versions of its period-tracking feature).

Women's Health adds that menstrual cycle tracking "was one of the most consistently requested features from Fitbit users. The company says many users already used separate apps to track their periods, but wanted to put all their information in one convenient place."

Huh. Well, learned something new today.